July 11, 1877 to December 31, 1877

Stemming from a large sea storm in the Caribbean Sea (which devastated the island of Curacao) many parts of Virginia, and the rest of the South, were flooded with water. In Lynchburg, the rising waters destroyed many key bridges connecting sides of the James River. In addition, ships all across the Atlantic coast were destroyed. The canal system for commerce was greatly damaged by this and other...

Hal Anderson lost everything on October 9, 1877. Ander son's house in Braden's Station, Tennessee, just outside of Memphis, was burned, and three of his children perished in the flames and a fourth was so badly burned that is life is despaired of. The news bulletin about the story in the Jackson, Mississippi Weekly Clarion was cryptically brief. The parents had left the children alone in...

President Rutherford B. Hayes, along with Secretary McCrary and Attorney-General Devens, visited and spoke at the Maryland Frederick County Fair on October 11, 1877.The President was welcomed with a speech remarking on his previous visit to the area as a Civil War solider and the turmoil of that time. The President then spoke about the importance of agriculture, saying that if agriculture was prosperous,...

By September, 1877, Governor Vance of North Carolina, elected in 1876, called upon the immigrant laborers of Northern cities, such as those currently on strike in Baltimore, to venture to North Carolina to fill what he perceived to be a labor shortage in North Carolina manufacturing and industry. Not all North Carolinian's agreed. A letter to the editor of the Raleigh Register dated September...

Lafayette Maupin invested his money in a local store in town.One night it burned down and he lost everything he had put into his investment.Later that night he went into the woods and killed himself.He had been married to a young girl who was only 16 years old when he shot himself.Since she no longer had him to care for her, she went back to live with her family for support.

On his November 11, 1877 speech to the Republican caucus committee, Hayes announced that his new conciliatory course towards Southerners would encourage the former Whigs to join the Republican Party. Hayes tried to ingratiate many of these old Whigs, and other Southern business powers by passing acts such as the Texas and Pacific Railroad Bill, as well as organizing the house under the pro-subsidy...

On July 16, 1877 tensions over pay cuts for railway workers finally came to a head as firemen and brakemen for railroads in Baltimore went on strike. The strikers assembled at Camden Junction, 30 miles from Baltimore, and refused to allow trains to move in any direction. Word of the strike quickly spread to West Virginia, and eventually into Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Kentucky as other railway...

In her memoirs, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones described the night in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that strikers from the Pennsylvania Railroad turned the "Great Strike" of 1877 into a riot. "Hundreds of box cars standing on the tracks were soaked with oil and set on fire and sent down the tracks to the roundhouse. The roundhouse caught fire. Over one hundred locomotives belonging to the Pennsylvania...

Henson Batson and Margaret Shorter were going to get married. That much was certain as they traveled to Washington D.C. from their rural home with Margaret's sister on Christmas Eve, 1877. What wasn't quite so certain was where in the city they could go to hold the ceremony. When they came upon a group of reporters waiting outside City Hall they anxiously asked how, where, and how fast they...

On the morning of July 16th, 1877, an excursion train of black people left Clarksville, Tennessee en route to attend the funeral services of the black Reverend Wm. Neville. During the duration of the trip, news somehow reached the sheriff of Todd country, KY that there were some blacks on board the train who were engaging in illegal commerce: the selling and buying of cigars and liquors on board...